Womenism and sports fairness
By Bruce Walker
web posted September 2, 2002
Feminism is finally receiving general contempt from sensible
people. The better name for this most perverse modern misology
is womenism, and its malice toward "maleness" reaches the nadir
of those other vile secular religions which reject "Jewish science"
or "European values."
The absurdity of womenism sometimes appears in innocuous
places. A recent news story announced that a young woman had
earned a place on Mercer County College football team as a
place kicker. Those of us sympathetic to competition applaud
the general principle that people should not be kept from
enjoying government supported benefits because of artificial
barriers, but those of us once sympathetic to womenism know
that womenists do not genuinely believe in universal principles:
they only believe in the parochial interests of women and
especially in the interests of those women who agree with
womenism.
As a counterpoint to the Mercer County College story, another
recent news story noted that Michelle Drumareq, a transsexual,
had earned a place on Canada's World Mountain Biking
Championship Team. Sylvia Allen, Canada's top female
mountain biker, planned to file a formal protest because
Michelle, as a transsexual, was not a "woman" (i.e. the
Womenist equivalent of a "pure Aryan").
This ugly side of womenism appeared thirty years ago when Dr.
Rene Richards, then a fifty-year old transsexual athlete who had
once been an average male tennis player, was prevented from
participating as a professional woman tennis player because she
was not "really a woman." Like Jews in Nazi Germany who had
converted to Christianity, men who had become women could
never be "true women."
If womenists will not even grant equality to those men who have
become women, then what are the chances that womenists will
grant men equality? The blatant bigotry of segregation in sports
programs supported by tax dollars shows the gender equivalent
of Hitler's racial theories: team athletics that involve serious
competition are not open to both sexes on an equal basis,
because strong, fast young men are not allowed to participant in
competition with women.
Why? As with all leftist poison, the underlying theme is "The end
justifies the means." If sports teams were open to both sexes, if
there was fair competition for each position, then the best female
high school basketball player would have a difficult time earning
a starting position on the worst coed basketball team in America.
The result - all that matters to leftists - would be "unfair" because
one gender would nearly always do better than the other gender.
But this rule only applies to gender, and not to other natural
differences in human beings. Only a few people are athletically
gifted, and only a few men or women ever have a chance to
become a competitive sport athlete. womenists do not suggest
that short women, for example, should be allowed to form a
separate, government supported basketball team - even though
short women cannot compete with tall women in basketball.
What womenists loath admitting is that the segregation of males
and females in athletics was never intended to be a tool of
oppression by a patriarchal cabal, but that it was intended to do
just what womenists want also: to protect girls and young women
from real competition with boys and young men.
The pretense that these inferior levels of competition ought to be
judge equal to adult male athletic competition is absurd, and the
corollary to this - that WNBA games should be as prominent as
NBA games (although the latter allow women to compete with
men, and the former allows only women) is also absurd. The
interest in professional athletics is precisely because it is the very
best against the very best.
History means nothing to womenists, Nazis or other leftists. If the
lessons of past human experience guided womenists, then they
would perceive those demands for "women only" sports look
only not like the Nuremberg Laws, but also like the wretched
segregation of black athletics so rightly deplored by those who
believe in equal opportunity.
The consequence was not just to deprive black athletes of the
most basic rights of opportunity, but to diminish the whole
concept of professional athletics. The college football records of
Red Grange must be considered in the light of racial exclusion
that kept a defensive player like Lawrence Taylor or Reggie
White from tackling him. Serious competition - the sort of
competition in college sports and professional leagues which
people pay to watch - involves all the unfairness of gender, age,
and inborn ability.
But is pure, naked competition what most of us seek for our
children in sports? What parent truly wants his sons and
daughters competing against big, tough boys? Or, without any
mocking intending, what parent of a retarded child wants that
Special Olympics open to all children?
There is nothing wrong with a girls' softball team or a boys'
football team. Consent, not coercion, should govern all types of
sports - some of which are intended to be high-level competition
and commercial activities and some of which are intended as
social, friendly activities.
This means that if men wish to gather at a club for males only,
then womenists may whine but not sue, and this means that if
Canadian women wish to form "Women's Only Mountain Biking
Inc." (as Canadian women, in fact, have done) then the fellows
accept this with good cheer.
Conservatives believe that biggest problem in modern life is that
leftists have regulated everything, including morals and manners. I
am offended by country clubs that do not allow blacks or Jews
or Catholics, as I am when the Ku Klux Klan, which makes the
same invidious distinctions. But this offensive attitude manifests
itself by my election not to support these bigots with my vote in
the marketplace of social, cultural and economic intercourse.
I am offended by private organizations which irrationally exclude
women, but not by a National Football League rule which simply
reflects the obvious and natural differences between men and
women or by the decision of the Boy Scouts not to include girls.
These discriminations are no more intended to offend than the
rules of a Reform Temple which require that the rabbi be a Jew
or the exclusion of men from La Leche meetings.
As with is true with every other human activity, left alone people
will act with common sense and allow our natural differences to
not impede a happy and friendly community of human activity.
When womenism - like Marxism and Nazism - is recognized as
simply another name for the Ku Klux Klan, then men and
women can begin to enjoy the blessings of differences in human
interest and ability, instead of seeing every deviation from the
arithmetic mean as a sinister plot.
Bruce Walker is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is
also a contributor to Citizens View, The Common Conservative,
Conservative Truth and Port of Call.
Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com